Losing data is one of the worst things that can happen to you especially if you haven't used a backup solution.

Help is at hand however with Stellar Phoenix NTFS Data Recovery is a complete data recovery solution that helps you to search, locate and recover lost, missing, inaccessible or deleted data on FAT drives. It's aimed at those unfortunate users who have lost data due to accidental reformatting, virus attacks, software errors and unexpected shutdowns.

However, this particular version is only for those with NTFS formatted drives - if you're not sure what type of drive you have then right click on your hard drive and select "properties" to see whether you're using an NTFS drive. Most Windows users are now on NTFS which is considerably quicker and doesn't fragment as much although older systems, such as those using Windows 2000.

The program has been designed with ease of use in mind - the software has a very simple GUI that includes a find file option, file mask and file filter so that you can target specific file types. It's also pretty useful if you want to partition your drive to install alternative operating systems.

The program works courtesy of a 'Raw File Recovery' feature that can recognizes & recovers more than 300 file types including documents, spreadsheets, web content & images. However, this doesn't mean it will always recognise the files that you are looking for because if they've been corrupted, the structure or format may also have been changed.

Nevertheless, if you've lost data on an NTFS drive then you've got little to lose by running this although it doesn't detect everything that's been lost or corrupted.